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I am sure this topic has been discussed a million time on WebmasterWorld but here it goes again. My website which was released in about March of this year has been doing well in the SERP's and for a couple of my keywords I am on page one. I am looking to further develop it and monetise it more effectively. So I build in a new section. I found a local company to partner with and build out a section of the site that sells their products. Infact I thought that their design was so good that I basically just copied it. Now the new page had been doing well in the SERP's, bottom of page two until yesterday, I woke up, checked it and it was GONE. Completely dropped from the G index. No direct cache of it in Google. e.g If you do a direct query for the page in Google no record of it. But in some other results it still showed in the cache. Perhaps its in the supplemental? So to try and improve the situation, I banged in a text editor in the CMS and dropped in text in two places, top of the page and bottom of the page and put in about 300 words. In addition I kept the same design but used synamons to substitute words for similiar words throught the body of the page. Which is the section I was penalised in the first place for.

Will this page come back into the index? If so how long do you think I will have to wait? Why is there no message in GWMTools? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the response Tedster. But alas the page is still not back. As stated previously I have put in a text editor in two spots and added a couple of hundred words of unique text. So far this hasn't worked. But then I'm not sure how long these penalties can last for once you've fixed the problem. Does anyone know? I am going to build in a testomonials section on the page which should generate fresh/unique content. Any other ideas? The other thing: is it just text that gets these types of penalties or does it include: numbers e.g prices and structure/layout of the page? Thanks in advance.

There is no true penalty for this kind of duplicate or near-duplicate content situation. A true penalty is very rare, and to get one you need to be doing a lot of scraping and auto-generated websites.

However, there can be a filter because your content is too much like that on other sites. There can also be a human reviewer flag that the site doesn't offer anything to the visitor that is particularly unique or compelling.

Our members have reported time frames of a few days up to a year for seeing the ranking problems lift. There really is no ballpark answer, as far as I know.

thanks once again for getting back to me. Just to make things clear, the site hasn't suffered any penalty in rankings. Its just this one page that has been removed from the G index. So I will continue to change the content on the page and maybe it will come back into the index. Are you aware of any other similiar cases and how long it took for the pages to come back?

Andreas8 - How have you determined that the page has been removed from the index, as opposed to not ranking in the top 1000 or not in the cache?

Have you tried searching for an exact text string in quotes, unique to your version of the page?

Additionally, try the search and then disable the dupe filter, by adding &filter=0 to the end of the first results page url and then hitting Enter or Go to view the results which that new url brings up.

I think the code is ok. The code is not an exact copy but the information on the page was the same.

To determine if the page was removed from G index I used the cached snapshot of page in the G toolbar and I ran a search for the URL in quotes. Nothing showed. I also took your suggestion and added &filter=0 and again nothing.

I am quite convinced that the page has been removed for dupe content. But now I am going to alter the text by adding a testimonials section which will be unique content. And if that doesn't work I will remove everything from the URL and put a load of unique text on the URL. Wait a week or two. Create a new URL, a similiar one but not the same and then bang the new version of the page on that new URL. That should be fine I think.

Would somebody be able to get back to me please, about "I am quite convinced that the page has been removed for dupe content. But now I am going to alter the page by adding a testimonials text section which will be unique content. And if that doesn't work I will remove everything from the URL and put a load of unique text on the URL. Wait a week or two. Create a new URL, a similiar one but not the same and then bang the new version of the page on that new URL. That should be fine I think?" Will that be ok? Will google see me as trying to manipulate their search results?

Also, I'm not as convinced as you say you are about the cause of your situation. Pages with duplicate content usually get filtered from the results, rather than removed from the index. But maybe the question of domain/page/url is blurring my understanding.

I mean using a new URL from the same domain. So changing from www.widgets.com/Blue to www.widgets.com/Lovely-Old-Blue The domain itself has alot of inbounds and a good PR so I would prefer to keep it. And I think you are right about the filter. We found the page today in the index but what surprises me is that it doesn't show when you check the Google cache. Why would it be in the index but have no cache? So we are going ahead with building in testimonials section as it will add new fresh content and it will benefit the user. Surely this is what the G god wants. But I am worried that if we change URL's then G will think we are trying to manipulate the results. Perhaps its just best to keep the same URL and build in the testimonials section on the page. Surely G has a cache of this page and if we release it on the new URL even with changed testimonials content. It may see this as manipulation.

It happens quite a lot that pages are showing in the results but do not have a "Cached" link showing. Sometimes a "Cached" link is displayed for one keyword search nut not for another. The publicly visible cached page is a separate function from Google's caching of the information in their back end. There are time lags between the two (Google's back end "caching" and the publicly visible "Cached" link) and you can't count on them being coordinated all the time.

Tedster you were right. I have found the page for another similiar but different search term and it is ranking quite well for that one. e.g "lovely blue widgets" but it is nowhere to be found for "Blue widgets". So I presume a filter is in place. Any thoughts about what may have caused this if it is keyword specific? Link building? And how long the filter might last? Or perhaps what I can do to investigate?

In the interests of sharing knowledge (because we are stronger as a species when we do so :-) With my duplicate content penalty and I beleive that I definately had one and the page was put in the supplemental index. I changed the content and walla! It came back into the index. I only noticed that today so you can see that pages can come back quickly if there is not dup content. (look at the dates on the thread)